One of the hallmarks of aspiring athletes is the desire to improve themselves and a professional in the long run. Athletes at all levels use mental training and sports psychology to become better athletes, and overcome their mental game challenges. Mental training helps athletes perform more consistently, find the zone more often, keep a winning streak alive, and learn how to think well under pressure.
If you are an aspiring athlete but don’t know the challenges you are likely to face before becoming a professional, relax, you have made the right step by reading this post. In this post, I will walk you through the 5 major struggles aspiring athletes like you face before becoming a professional.
Let’s get started…
#1. Time Management
The first factor that negatively hinders aspiring athletes is poor time management skills. Inability to properly find time to combine full-time employment, academics, and athletics is the leading cause of aspiring athletes’ failure. Being too devoted to their sport, aspiring athletes are inattentive to schoolwork or corporate life. Between classes, homework, practices, games, and travel, it can be a challenge to fit everything in. However, with great time management strategies, aspiring athletes can juggle all the responsibilities and accomplish academic and athletic goals.
#2. Lack Of Sponsors
Like musicians, artists, and entrepreneurs, aspiring athletes have big dreams. But unfortunately, many lack the necessary funding and sponsorships to help realize their audacious goals. A sponsor will certainly look to get associated with someone they have heard about. They would certainly want to get their money’s worth. Aspiring athletes often do not define the pathway and that makes it difficult to attract sponsors. In return for backing sports endeavors, sponsors have the potential to receive a variety of rewards and the feeling that they’ve helped aspiring athletes along the path to success. If you are currently struggling with getting sponsors, you can try out these platforms – Rallyme, SportFunder, and www.sponsor.me
#3. Diet To Maintain Optimal Health And Fitness Levels
Many aspiring athletes will find it difficult to achieve sound nutritional practices to optimize their sports performance. Factors include poor nutrition knowledge, dietary extremism, poor practical skills in choosing or preparing meals, and reduced access to food due to a busy lifestyle and frequent travel.
Education in nutrition for the athlete needs to be practical, so as to address eating strategies and key food and fluid choices that will help to achieve the goals of sound nutrition. Strategies that can achieve a number of nutritional goals simultaneously are most useful, since aspiring athletes often find it difficult to integrate separate issues. Try using MyFitnessPal where they know very well that fitness starts with what we eat.
#4. Inability To Get Motivated To Train
Motivation is the mental process that initiates, sustains or guides an aspiring athlete’s behavior (training, approach to competition, managing adversity, performance). There are two types of motivation in sports: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.
If you are struggling to get excited about training, you may need to reevaluate your intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Plus, you can combat this challenge by writing down your main performance goals and the exact training regimen necessary to achieve each. Also, keep track of your progress in training with something like Fitbit.
#5. Disregarding Injuries
A mistake that many aspiring athletes make is not giving their bodies a chance to completely heal from injury before continuing in competition. The notion of “no pain…no gain” is archaic. When you disregard injuries, it will become a cog in the wheel of your progress. Therefore, get diagnosed early and be patient with rehab before returning. Stop thinking about the time you’re missing, the disappointment in your coach, etc., and instead, focus on your long term plan to become even better once you are completely healed.
And that would be it! If you are an aspiring athlete, you need to keep these challenges in mind and find ways to resolve them so that you can become a professional athlete in the coming months.
For more great inspiration, check my video on Discipline below to stay on top of your A GAME!
What challenges are you currently struggling with as an aspiring athlete? Share your thoughts with us via the comment box below.
Stay strong & healthy!
